heartsong wrote:This is probably a stupid question, but what are tmb's expenses?

We do eat up a very large amount of bandwidth (over 120 Gig a month now) and bandwidth costs money.

Before someone kindly offers me bandwidth at a great price, we need root access to the server, and we need 24/7 maintenance (meaning if it goes down when I'm not looking, someone will get it back up and running). We've worked hard to get a great system at a very competitive price.

Beyond that there are some other costs associated with any ministry - banking costs, legal fees, filing fees and so on.

Frankly the TMB is less than we'd like it to be because of a lack of funds. We'd like to have boards for other groups (singles, youth, those going through a divorce). We'd like to update and add to what's on the rest of the site. We'd also like to be able to actually pay a primary moderator, with the wonderful volunteers helping out rather than having to pull the full load (lack of good mods is one reason we can't start new boards).

And yes, Lori and I do pull a small housing allowance, when all the other bills have been paid. In reality we've not yet been "repaid" for the money we put into TMB before it was non-profit and accepting donations. Not that we are in it for the money - the goal was to free us up enough to do more in the way of articles - in the past it did this, but now the amount is far to small to keep us from needing full time jobs. I've got some folks telling me that needs to change, not sure where that will go.

We do greatly appreciate all who give to TMB, both the end of year one off gifts and the folks who give monthly. We could no longer afford to carry the cost ourselves, and we are happy that there are those who see what is being done here as worth supporting.